Free Elemental Omen (Paranormal Public Book 10) by Maddy Edwards Page B

was running through a field, wildflowers were everywhere, I found myself smiling. I felt safe and happy; I felt like I was going home. The level of comfort I felt in the dream was in stark contrast to the situation I found myself during my waking life, captured by bloodthirsty Bounty Hunters who would know who I was in the morning. I couldn’t be sure what they would do with me, but none of the likely options were good.
    Option 1. Sell me to the slave drivers, those who used others’ paranormal power for their own ends. There were a handful of very rich drivers who could pay any price for me. The paranormal president had tried to have them arrested, but they lived in the mountains, up in the clouds, and were too protected to be vulnerable to a fight.
    Option 2. Ransom me to my family. This was unlikely. They wouldn’t want my family’s attention.
    Option 3. Put me to work assisting in creating powerful workings. There were all sorts of advanced spells that hadn’t been performed for years because all the paranormal types weren’t available to come together. Whoever had me would no longer have that problem.
    Option 4. Sell me to one of the sects that still opposed the paranormal government and wanted to weaken its base. They would most likely kill me in some spectacular fashion. I could at least try to keep that from happening. Even without my ring, I wasn’t entirely powerless.
    Option 5. Let me go. Hahahaha.
     
    I wasn’t holding my breath for any of these, but I had a feeling that the most likely outcome was that Spark and his clan would sell me to the slave drivers. Bounty Hunters loved money above all else, and once the chase was over there wasn’t much else. I could make an entire clan rich for generations with the price I would generate from a driver. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of life that would mean, never mind that my friends were expecting me to come home eventually, and that would probably never happen if I was taken as a slave. I kicked myself for being so careless as to drop that damned ring! I thought about Sparell and how I could best get through to her, but I knew that realistically they were probably going to kill her in the morning. They were at least going to kill Spark if I didn’t do something about it, idiot that he was.
     

Chapter Ten
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    The next memory that stuck in my mind about why I had to run away was more complicated. I tried not to think about it too much, because I didn’t understand what had happened, and that made me angry.
    Right after the last Nocturn battle, a paranormal police officer said to me, “I’m not sure how all of this is going to shake out, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side, do you?” He had been trying to give me his uniform hat as a sign of honor, but I had pushed it away. I had never liked hats very much to begin with, and it felt entirely possible that this one had lice.
    That was the first moment of several that had led me to think I should leave my sister and the safety of Paranormal Public to seek my own world and my own life, far, far away from the demands that were being made on the elementals. The next of those moments came two years later, a year before I left. Paranormal Public ended up closing for a while after the battle, because many of the buildings had serious structural damage, and anyhow, the students were needed by their families and home towns to help rebuild after the destruction that darkness had caused. The public hadn’t seen Lisabelle Verlans in a year and had stopped demanding an apology from her for “what she had allowed to happen.” Charlotte was being hailed as a hero, so far as I could see, and Sip was overwhelmed by the demands of running a government that had no money and little support.
    Charlotte and I spent a lot of our time at a cottage on the Rapier estate. As Dacer said and everyone else seemed to agree, vampire lands that were controlled by the Blood Queen were the safest havens we